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Boulder County Fairgrounds' osprey cam has gone dark

By John FryarLongmont Times-Call

Posted:
05/17/2013 04:19:04 PM MDT

Updated:
05/17/2013 04:20:32 PM MDT

An osprey retrieves sticks for its nest near Cattail Pond at the Boulder County Fairgrounds on Tuesday, March 26, 2013. The county's camera on the nest has quit working, and crews won't be able to repair it until after the end of the season.
(Greg Lindstrom/Times-Call)

LONGMONT -- The Boulder County Fairgrounds' popular "osprey cam" is off the air and likely will remain that way for the rest of this year's nesting season.

"I'm just heartbroken," said Vivienne Jannatpour, a communications specialist for the county Parks and Open Space Department.

Jannatpour said a rainstorm last week might have knocked out the live feeds and still images from the camera mounted near the osprey nest that sits atop a platform on the eastern edge of Cattail Pond.

The last image from the solar panel-powered webcam was captured at 4 p.m. May 8, with one of the adult birds sitting atop at least one egg, which was laid about two afternoons earlier.

Whatever the cause of the outage, county workers cannot get to the camera itself to diagnose and possibly fix the problem for fear of disturbing the adult osprey pair occupying the nest where the female laid that first egg and, by now, possibly others.

Nor will anyone be allowed to get close to the nest until after the chick or chicks hatch, are fed by their parents and eventually make their own first ventures outside the nest.

For this year's season, at least, "there's nothing we can do," Jannatpour said.

The Parks and Open Space Department announced the outage on Facebook on Thursday, and Jannatpour said she's been fielding emailed questions about it since then.

She said the only answer she can provide is, "I'm sorry. I'm sorry."

The fairgrounds osprey camera was also down for several months last year, due to what officials said later turned out to be a manufacturer's defect in the system originally installed in 2012. The camera was repaired and reinstalled in January, with workers setting it further from the nest to get a wider shot of the birds.

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